Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, The.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay. With a prefatory memoir by Roger Ingpen. Illustrated with portraits. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1908.
8vo.; satin book mark; one leaf opened roughly, with no loss of text; 3 sepia portraits of Wollstonecraft, two engraved from the canonical portrait by John Opie; red cloth, stamped in gilt; a bright, unrubbed copy.
First edition, highly uncommon, of what appears to be a redacted edition of C. Kegan Paul’s 1879 edition. Ingpen made a career of abridging and sanitizing classic works for a wide audience. In this instance his edits soften Wollstonecraft’s tone; his short excisions also contribute to a less truculent voice. Though in his preface Ingpen refers to the significance of the biographical sketch that Paul contributed to his 1879 edition of the Wollstonecraft-Imlay correspondence, he has nothing to say about how the text of the letters in his edition compares to the earlier one. Windle A10a.
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